


Everything Hurts

by prepare4trouble



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Foggy whump, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Matt to the Rescue, too late
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-04-10 09:28:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4386572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prepare4trouble/pseuds/prepare4trouble
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Foggy is kidnapped as part of an experiment, Matt rescues him, but not before the damage is done.<br/>Kinkmeme prompt</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Everything Hurts

**Author's Note:**

> This is just about the shortest thing I've ever written. I wrote it in about 15 minutes when I should be in bed asleep, I think I checked for typos, but let me know if you catch any!
> 
> Prompt was:  
> In one of the issues from Waid's DD, Bullseye comes back and uses diferent people to try and copy the accident that made Matt the way he is.
> 
> Most of them die but he succeds with Foggy and makes Foggy blind and with the senses thing, Matt finds him too late and Foggy is overwhelmed by everything.  
> http://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/3230.html?thread=6669982#cmt6669982
> 
> I'm really going to try to fill something less evil next time, I promise!

A dozen tiny rooms reminiscent of prison cells. Matt can hear only one heartbeat. The entire building is permeated with a smell he remembers from his childhood, a chemical tang filling the air, so thick with bad memories that it is hard to breathe.

He rounds a corner and sprints in the direction of the surviver. Beyond the walls of some of the cells, lay corpses awaiting disposal. His own heart beats so hard in his chest that he can barely hear his target, let alone tell who it might be. He prays silently as he runs; prays not only for it to be Foggy, but for him to be okay. For him not yet to have been the subject of the madman’s experiment.

He is asking too much, and he knows it.

The heart is pounding unnaturally quickly, faster even than his own. Matt reaches the door, and as he stands outside he knows who is inside, and relief washes over him like a tsunami. He staggers, momentarily knocked off his feet under the wave.

The door is unlocked; all of them are. When he shorted out the electricity, the locking system had failed immediately. Matt pushes open the door and steps inside.

Foggy is crouched on the floor in the corner of the room. As the door opens, his heart rate and breathing grow faster still. His feet squeak on the floor as he tightens his arms’ grip around his knees and screws himself into a tighter ball. “Whoever you are, just leave me alone now, okay?”

His voice is hoarse as though from screaming, and Matt can taste the salty tang of tears in the air. He steps forward. “Foggy,” he says.

Foggy’s entire body appears to jerk in shock as he recognizes the voice, he gasps, his feet squeak on the floor again and Matt hears his clothing moving against the floor and wall of the cell.

“It’s going to be okay,” Matt told him.

Foggy’s heart rate had slowed enough that Matt was no longer worried he might go into cardiac arrest, but at that statement it quickens again, accompanied by a series of gasps as though he is trying not to cry. The salty taste in the air grows stronger. “Everything hurts,” Foggy whispers. “Matt, they… I… I can’t see anything.”

Matt’s teeth clamp down hard on his bottom lip and he rushes forward now to help Foggy to his feet. It is dark in the room. It has to be, there are no windows, he had cut the electricity. There may be a chance… he pulls Foggy closer to him. The smell of the chemicals is strong on his skin. Slowly, carefully, Matt traces a hand across his face. He can feel the differences in the texture of the skin where the chemicals have burned him, where they have destroyed his sight in exactly the same way they had Matt’s own.

Foggy pushes his hand away. “Hurts,” he says. Outside, the first of the police cars arrives, sirens wailing. Foggy draws back, hands covering his ears, hissing in pain. “Make it stop,” he says, so plaintive that Matt would give almost anything to do as he asks. He fights the urge to hug him, the pressure on his skin might be painful.

“It’s going to be okay,” he promises. He prays he hasn’t just lied to his best friend. He doesn’t know yet whether Foggy fully understands the enormity of what has been done to him. He will soon, when the dust settles and he is faced with picking up the pieces and trying to put them back together again. And Matt will be there for that, and for everything afterwards. He pulls him closer, risking a careful embrace because he knows the contact will be comforting. “It’ll be okay,” he says again. “Come on, lets get you out of here.”

He guides Foggy with an arm around his shoulder. One of them is trembling as they walk slowly out of the building, he can feel it through the contact between Foggy’s body and his own. He has no idea which one of them it is.


	2. Savior

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Foggy's rescue from his point of view.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I honestly had no intention of writing any more, but I did anyway. Not much new here yet though, the same scene from Foggy's point of view. I might write more. I'd like to. We'll see how it goes.

He feels too cold and too warm at the same time. He isn’t sure how that is possible; it isn’t like he is alternating between the two states, they both appear to be present at exactly the same time. He can feel the sweat on his skin, from the thin layer of grease covering his face to the twin geysers underneath his arms. He imagines he can feel every single pore. He shivers in the cold of the cell.

He is still dressed in the same suit he had been wearing for work when he had been taken, torn and probably filthy now, because nobody can say Foggy Nelson surrenders without a fight. The fabric irritates his skin. The worst are the labels, he is acutely aware of them pressing against him, he rubs at them with his hands from the other side of the fabric, feeling every fiber with his fingers as he does.

He adjusts his position on the floor and feels the scratchy blended woolen fibers in his pants scrape against the too delicate skin of his legs and he fights the urge to scream. A sound escapes from his throat anyway, a low pitched, moan of despair and misery. His ears ring with the echo of it. He can’t bring himself to remove the clothes because that would mean moving again. It would mean risking his bare flesh against the concrete floor of the room where he was being held, and he doesn’t know what that would be like. It might be worse. It would definitely be colder.

There is nothing he can do to improve his comfort level; every movement is agony. He feels a frustrated, miserable sob working its way up from deep inside him and he pushes it down again. Whoever they are, they might be watching him and he refuses to give them that satisfaction.

It is so loud in the room. He can hear his own heartbeat, pounding like a drum, he feels his body shake under the force of it. It beats quickly, adrenaline and terror teaming up within him to trigger a fight or flight reflex that is completely useless under the circumstances. He tries to slow his breathing in the hopes that his heart will follow suit. It doesn’t work.

He can hear people all around him, footsteps, drum beats of other hearts, conversations that he should not be able to hear. In a nearby room probably very similar to the one where he is being kept, someone is crying quietly to themselves. The air hums loudly with an electrical buzz, he can hear traffic passing not far away. He shouldn't be able to hear any of it.

He can’t see. He opens his eyes wide, staring through the blackness before them searching for something, for anything. Total, complete darkness. He hugs his arms around his legs and screws his eyes tightly closed. There had been light before they had done… what they did. He feels his trembling grow worse as his muscles tighten.

At the other side of the building, somebody screams.

He can smell himself. The familiar stench of his own body odor amplified a hundred times. He tries to concentrate on something else, but it is literally the only thing he can smell. Some semi-coherent part of his brain tells him that that is probably for the best.

The woman crying in the other room stops. He hears a dull banging sound, like somebody thumping a wall. Somehow, he knows it is not her hand, but her head banging repeatedly against the hard surface. The persistent heartbeat from her cell slows as she loses consciousness, stopping around the same time he hears her head hit the wall for a final time. A new smell creeps slowly in, and it makes him gag. He wishes he could only smell himself again.

Suddenly, without warning, the hum of electricity stops. The sudden absence of the sound feels like being plunged into a vacuum and Foggy feels himself gasp in shock at the sensation of silence. New noise quickly rushes in to fill the void, the street outside appears to grow louder, the conversation suddenly changing to exclamations of shock and horror. Screams follow quickly after.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there in the dark, trying to ignore the onslaught of sensations wracking his body. Everything hurts; his skin from his clothing, from the pressure of his position on the floor, his face is burning where the unknown liquid was dripped onto him from above. He can still feel a ghost of the sensation of the metal cuffs around his wrists and ankles that had held him in place during the procedure and the apparatus that held his eyes open. His ears ache from the loud sounds, he feels like he needs to vomit from the smells and tastes assaulting his nose and his tongue. He suppresses the urge because he knows how much worse that would make things. He moans quietly to himself and tries not to feel it.

Somebody is coming. He hears footsteps approaching from outside his cell, a beating heart. The footsteps grow faster as they approach.

The door opens almost silently, a gust of cool air, only slightly fresher than that inside his cell, rushes in as the person steps inside. Foggy tenses, remembering the last visit from his captors, remembering being strapped to the table, the talk sounding clinical and scientific as they prodded and poked him like a piece of meat. Hadn’t they done enough? Against his will, he feels himself leaning forward, drawing his knees closer to his chest, tightening his arms’ grip around his legs, as though if he makes himself as small as he could, they will overlook him. The scratchy fabric of his suit is driven further into the top layer of his skin.

He takes a deep breath and he can feel it shaking. He wants to sound confident, commanding, he knows before he opens his mouth that he will fail. The best he can hope for is not pathetic. He fails at that too. “Whoever you are, just leave me alone now, okay?”

The person steps forward and Foggy shrinks further still.

“Foggy.”

Matt. He gasps, confusion and relief vying for lead position in his mind. He opens his eyes, desperate to see him, to verify that what he is hearing is real and not some trick of his mind.

Nothing but darkness.

“It’s going to be okay,” the voice - Matt’s voice - tells him.

He is wrong. Foggy feels a wave of panic threaten to overwhelm him. He shakes his head and he can hear the ends of his own hair rubbing against the collar of his shirt. “Everything hurts,” he whispers, because he can’t think of any other way to express what he is feeling. It feels as though the darkness is pressing hard against his eyes and still he strains futilely to see through it. “Matt, they… I…” he doesn’t know how to explain. “I can’t see anything.” He hears his voice crack on the final word. He can feel the tears on his cheeks, they run silently down his face, and he doesn’t know whether it is his terror and sorrow, or a result of the chemicals.

Matt is on him in a second, crouching on the floor next to him, pulling him to his feet. A hand touches his face, fingers lightly tracing the skin around his eyes and his cheek and it feels like hot coal being dragged across already burnt flesh. He backs off, pushing the hand away. “Hurts,” he manages to explain.

A siren cuts through the relative silence of the cell, the sound like a knife. His hands rush up to cover his ears, the feeling of his own skin against his face is uncomfortable. He knows how pathetic he sounds and he knows that there is nothing that Matt can do, but he can’t help himself begging anyway. “Make it stop.”

Matt draws him in and wraps his arms around him, and that hurts too, but it’s alright because it is Matt, and Matt is safety. “It’ll be okay,” Matt tells him, and this time he almost - almost - believes him. “Come on, let’s get you out of here.”

Matt’s arm around his shoulder is a gentle pressure, Foggy leans into it, pouring all his concentration into not collapsing as Matt gently guides him out of the building.


	3. Guilt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look what happens when I start looking at my old fics. I get idea about continuing them!
> 
> Still no guarantee of more I'm just going to add to this as, when and if inspiration strikes. I do have a few ideas though, so there may well be more.

“I’ve patched his eyes,” Claire said. “And given him a mild sedative, but beyond that, there’s nothing else I can do. You need to get him to a hospital.” She sighed. She sounded as tired as he felt.

Matt shook his head, pacing the room simply because if he stopped he knew that he was going to punch a wall. “That’s the last thing he needs,” he said. “The smells, the tastes…”

“The medical attention.”

Matt continued to pace. “They can’t do anything for him, he said. “They can’t save his sight, they can’t undo what’s been done. All they can do is…” he stopped pacing and turned to face her. “They can’t do anything,” he said.

Claire took in a deep breath and glanced at the adjoining room, where Foggy Nelson lay. She bit her lip. “This is what happened to you, isn’t it?”

Matt shook his head. “That was an accident,” he said. “This was done deliberately. Someone knows about me, and was trying to re-create the situation that gave me my abilities.”

Claire went very quiet as she took that in. Matt could imagine her mind running through the same questions that had occurred to him. Did they know his identity? Had Foggy been chosen because of his relationship with Matt, or was it simply the world’s biggest co-incidence? Were there others in on it, and would they try it again?

“He should sleep for at least a few hours,” Claire told him. “But you should still take him to a hospital. If nothing else, they can register the injury. It’ll be hard to explain if there are no official records of what happened.”

That was the last thing he was concerned about now, but she was right. Somewhere down the line, Foggy would have to be officially registered as blind, there would have to be an explanation as to what had happened to him. He would have to go through rehabilitation, learn to use a cane, to read Braille. To not go insane from the sensory input that would bombard him for every moment of every day for the rest of his life.

Matt balled his hand into a fist and drove it hard into the nearest wall. It was made of plasterboard, fitted long after the building had been built. His hand went through it easily. Powdered plaster billowed in the air around the impact site, he coughed, and as he inhaled, tasted his own blood in the air.

“Matt, what the hell..?”

He withdrew his hand from the wall and walked to the kitchen, thrust it under the faucet and turned on the cold water.

Claire got to her feet. “Okay, I’m going to leave some pain pills on the shelf here, if he needs them. No more than two every four hours, okay?”

Matt nodded. He withdrew his hand from underneath the faucet and wrapped the bleeding knuckles in a dishcloth from the side of the sink.

“He’ll be okay, Matt.”

It was a platitude, and one that did nothing to make him feel better. He hoped she was right, but even if Foggy did somehow manage to get through this, he would never be the same. How could he be?

“If he needs anything…”

He nodded again. In the bedroom, underneath his silk sheets, Matt could already hear Foggy beginning to stir. He offered up a quick prayer that he would sleep a little longer, just a few more hours before he woke up and had to start dealing with what had happened.

Matt sat down on the sofa and ran a hand through his hair. He tried to force his mind back to those first few days after the accident, a time he didn’t visit often. He remembered fear, he remembered the sudden and absolute darkness that had become his world. The other stuff had come after, creeping up on him so slowly that he had barely noticed it at first. It hadn’t been until later, after his father had died, that the world had come crashing in with such force that it threatened to crush him. With Foggy it seemed different; like he was already there.

Somewhere on the edge of his consciousness, he heard the door opening and closing again, Claire’s footsteps down the hall.

In the bedroom, Foggy shifted again in the bed, a moan of discomfort escaping from between his lips.

Matt allowed his head to fall back against the top of the sofa. He removed his glasses and massaged his brow with the fingers of his left hand. This was his fault. Not only because he had gotten there too late; his friendship with Foggy may have put him in danger. The very fact of his existence, of his abilities, had given rise to this particular villain and his plan.

He felt the unmistakable sensation of tears beginning to well in his eyes. He brushed them away angrily. He didn’t have the right to cry.


	4. Stain

_Sometimes, he thinks that a part of him will always be in the prison cell._

_Four grey, concrete walls, a door made of metal painted a dark blue so long ago that it is chipped and bubbled, the ceiling above his head that had been white once, now yellowed with age, stained in patterns that looked as though something had seeped through from the floor above.  He can’t help but notice that one of the stains was the shape of Italy._

_There is no comfort there, not even a chair to sit in, nothing but the hard stone floor.  No window.  No view of the outside world._

“Just focus on your breathing.  In through your nose, out through your mouth.  Shut out everything else but the feeling of the air filling your lungs.”  Matt is sitting completely still opposite him.  They sit on chairs, Foggy doesn’t know whether he will ever be able to sit on the floor again without revisiting the cell.

_In his worst moments, he remembers the table.  Not a feature of the room, but a large metal thing on wheels that barely fits through the door.  It almost fills the room.  He struggles as they lift him onto it, but by now he is so weak with hunger and exhaustion that he can’t put up much of a fight.  There are four of them, one woman, three men, all wearing blank disinterested faces.  He has never been more sure than in this moment that he is nothing but a lab rat for their experiment._

“Concentrate on the cold sensation in your nostrils as you breathe in, the air filling your lungs.  Block everything else out, don’t let the things you can hear or smell distract you.” He can hear concern in Matt’s voice.  He can hear the drum-like pounding of his heart increase just slightly.

That’s not that problem.  He almost wishes that it was.

_He can still feel the thick straps securing first his arms and then his legs to the table, tightening until it is actually painful, pinning him to the hard metal surface.  Panic does not set in fully until that moment, when he realizes how completely at their mercy he truly is. The fifth and final strap is the worst.  Thinner than the others, it extends over his brow.  A man with brown hair, a lab coat and wire framed glasses tightens the strap with a buckle and he hears the leather creak against it._

He draws in a deep breath, keeping it slow and even, resisting the urge to give in to the feeling of panic that is rising within him as the memory threatens to overcome him.  He tries to do as Matt has instructed, feeling the air entering his body, bringing with it so many scents, food cooking in a nearby apartment, the smell of sweat from his own body, from Matt’s, from the neighbors across the hall.  Traffic fumes from the street below, somehow finding their way inside through the closed window.  He tries to ignore it all, to focus instead on the act of breathing.

_He struggles, writhing and wriggling uselessly against the bonds.  He strains to breathe, pulling in gulp after gulp of air and it never being enough. He barely catches a glimpse of the thing before they put it on._

_Metal, rounded edges rather than angular.  That is all he sees before it is too close to his face for him to see anything. A woman leans over him, carefully forcing the lids of his eyes open with gloved fingers as she lowers the thing still further until it touches his face. The frame rests on the lids of both his eyes, forcing them wide open with a gentle, unrelenting pressure.  Above him, the stain in the shape of Italy stares down at him._

He stops trying to meditate.  It is an exercise in frustration.  He takes in a final deep breath and releases it as a sigh, raking the fingers of both hands through his hair as he does.  He can feel the accumulated grease of so many days there.  He can feel every individual strand of hair, and noise almost like a ripping sound assaults his ears as his fingers part them.

“It’ll come,” Matt promises him. He sounds far away.

Foggy shivers as he wipes his hands on the sweatpants he is wearing.  He had bought them in college and barely looked at them since.  It occurs to him that he doesn’t remember what they look like.

He had always wanted to see Italy.  He remembers looking at a globe as a kid at school, spinning it around, looking at the shapes of the countries.  Italy had fascinated him, a boot kicking Sicily out into the ocean like a soccer ball.

Of course, there were a lot of things he had wanted to see.  Now he never will.

He wraps his arms around himself and slumps forward, squeezes his eyes tightly closed and tries not to think about that.  Somewhere in the building, a husband and wife are arguing about money.  Somewhere else, a teenage girl is screaming at her parents.  Matt still sits opposite him.  His presence is made of the constant beating of his heart, the sound of his breathing.  All around him he hears the sounds of everyday life, conversations mingled together to create a cacophony of noise; TVs, radios, traffic, the click of the keys on a nearby laptop, a baby crying as its mother tries to sooth its tears.

_His eyes flick wildly around the room, looking for anything that might help him out of his predicament.  He repeatedly tries to force his eyes closed, the cold metal frame prevents him from blinking.  They sting and he feels tears begin to well, instinctively trying to protect the delicate tissue from pollutants in the air.  It isn’t until his throat begins to hurt that he realizes he is screaming.  The four faces around him still appear uninterested as a man picks up a dropper from a shelf attached to the table where Foggy lies.  He unscrews the lid before pinching the rubber tip and removing it from the bottle._

_Another of his captors, a black man with hair cropped close to his head, reads from a chart.  “Let’s move to six drops for this subject,” he says.  “Each eye.”_

_Italy stares down at him from the ceiling, brown in the middle, fading to yellow around the edges.  The dropper appears in his line of vision, and he knows that there is nothing he can do.  He bites down hard on his bottom lip and stares upward.  Still he feels himself straining against the straps holding him in place, feels the leather biting further into his skin._

_For a fraction of a second, it doesn’t hurt, then it does.  The pain is searing, ripping through his eyes, itching, burning, sinking deep into the tissue.  He feels whatever is in the dropper spill from his eyes and begin to run down the sides of his face, leaving a trail of pain as it does and despite his attempts to stop himself, he is screaming again._

_They stop, back off and wait.  Agony tearing through his still wide open eyes, he stares up at the ceiling because he can’t do anything else.  His eyes find the stain in the shape of Italy.  As they do, his vision begins to swim, then fade to black from the edges inward.  The stain is the last thing he sees._

_He loses consciousness still strapped to the table.  The pain in his eyes is the last thing he is aware off until he awakens on the hard stone floor._

“Maybe…”  He hears Matt stand and begin to pace the room.  He can hear his exact position by the sound of his heart.  As he moves, the air currents in the room change subtly in ways that he doesn’t yet understand but knows that in time he will learn.  “Maybe meditation isn’t for you,” Matt says.  “Or maybe just not yet.  It’s not easy at first to quiet the mind, especially with all the…” he tails off.  Foggy knows what he means.  It is too loud, too many smells, tastes, sensations, but it is not that that is preventing him from following Matt’s instructions.

He raises his hands and covers his ears, blocking out a fraction of the sound that is bombarding him.  If this is how Matt experiences the world, then it is a miracle that he can get anything done at all.

He fights the urge to close his eyes, forcing himself instead to stare out into the impenetrable blackness before them.  Against his will, he feels his eyes flicking from left to right, straining, trying to adjust to the darkness and provide him with a glimpse of his surroundings.  His hands slip from his ears to the front of his face and cover his eyes instead in a crude attempt to stop the search.

“It… it’s not as bad as you think,” Matt tells him.

Foggy moves his hands and instinctively tries to look for the source of the voice.  Matt is behind him now, walking back to the chair in front of him.

“I mean, I know it’s… It’s not…”  Matt breaks off, and even from within the cell Foggy feels   
himself silently urging him on as he always does when Matt’s words fail him.

Outside on the street, a car's horn blares loudly, followed by a string of abuse.  The garbage can in the kitchen stinks of rotting food, so badly that it makes him want to vomit.  Matt's steps increase in speed as he progresses from walking around to actively pacing the room.

"It'll get better," Matt says. “Not your vision, I don’t mean, but you’ll learn how to…” he tails off again, then sighs.

The stain in the shape of Italy mocks him.  He had never gotten around to seeing the world.  He has a list in his head of all the places he had one day thought he would see.  He doesn't even have a passport.

"Stick used to tell me that sight was a distraction," Matt adds.  “He… he said it got in the way and I was better off without it."

"Stick was an asshole," Foggy tells him.  His voice sounds hoarse and he realizes that those are the first words he has spoken since the rescue.  Matt's heart rate jumps, just a little, and Foggy knows that he noticed that too.

Matt ceases his pacing instantly, as though someone has flipped a switch and halted his motion. Footsteps resume, in Foggy’s direction, approaching him from behind. Foggy can hear his exact location in his footsteps and the sound of his heart. “Hey,” he says, speaking in a low tone, as though dealing with a child or animal that he didn’t want to startle. “Are you back?”

Foggy doesn’t reply. He is still in the cell. He can still feel the restraints biting into his wrists and ankles, the metal frame pressing onto his eyes, preventing him from closing them. He forces his eyes to remain open, because when he closes them he can see the yellow stained ceiling. The darkness he sees here is preferable.

He forces his right hand to move, to touch his left wrist, he rubs gently, erasing the biting sensation of the leather strap. 

Matt moves again, his footsteps positioning him right in front of Foggy. The location of the sound of his heart drops a little, and Foggy realizes his is kneeling in front of him. As though he somehow knows what is in Foggy’s head, Matt’s hands reach for his arms. They caress gently where the restraints had been.

“They’re bruised,” he said. “Here,” he takes Foggy’s right hand in his and ran the fingers over his wrist with a little more pressure than Foggy had used. “Can you feel the difference in the texture? Not the skin itself, but underneath it.”

Foggy can. It is subtle, but his too sensitive fingertips can feel a slightly raised strip around the wrist, it corresponds to the location of the strap. He pulls his hand away. Matt touches him again, on the back of each hand, and somehow Foggy knows that it is to ground him, to bring him back. He closes his eyes and sees Italy above him.

"You okay?" Matt asks.

Foggy licks his lips.  He tries to lie, but he can’t bring himself to say the word. Besides, Matt would know he wasn’t, and not just because of the heartbeat thing. ”No,” he admits. He is holding back a tide of emotion, and that admission comes dangerously close to breaking the dam.

Matt doesn’t seem to know what to do with that, like he hadn’t expected honesty. He hesitates for a moment, then sits back down in the chair opposite. Foggy hears the springs creak. “You’ll get there,” he says.

Foggy forces himself to stay in the moment, not to slip back into the cell, not to look at the stain on the ceiling. “This world on fire thing is a bust,” he says. He forces a smile as he speaks although it is the last thing he wants to do, knowing that Matt will hear it.

“I…” Foggy hears a slight change in Matt’s breathing, he has no idea what it means. “I might not have explained it very well, I didn’t think you’d ever…” he tails off. “It’ll come. It's just a case of learning how to interpret what you can hear, taste, feel, smell. Use it to build up a mental image, but in time it'll become less like an image, more like a feeling."

"Simple as that, huh?”

“I never said it was simple.”

Foggy grunts. He doesn’t close his eyes, doesn’t slip back into the cell. The world is too loud, it stinks, but he breathes through his nose because it is better than the tastes he can detect in the air. His clothes irritate his skin, he is aware of the movement of the air in the apartment around him.

The straps are around his wrists again, around his ankles, pinning him down. He takes a deep breath. Matt touches his arm.

“I keep seeing the cell where they kept me,” he admits. “Not just seeing it, I’m there, experiencing it. There’s a stain on the ceiling that looks just like Italy, a..and it was the last thing I…” he breaks off suddenly as his throat constricts, choking the final word of his sentence. Someone walks past his the door to his apartment - no, the floor below him. A car slams on its breaks on the street outside. The garbage still reeks and he doesn’t know whether he would be able to bring himself to empty it even if he could see, which he can’t. Which he never will again.

If he could just see something else for a second, a flash of anything at all, he knows that he would be able to banish the cell, the map of Italy, even the straps around his arms and legs.

Just a second. Half a second.

Everything is too loud.

He balls his hands into fists and tries not to scream.

Matt’s grip on his arm tightens. “Want to hit something?” he asks. “I’ve got a punch pad in the closet.”

Foggy hesitates. That is Matt’s coping strategy, not his. But his is a night at Josie’s with a bottle of whiskey, and he’s not sure he could even stomach the taste any more.

“Come on.” Matt starts to pull him to his feet. Foggy follows without protest. Even if it doesn’t do anything for him, he can start to work on his spatial awareness. And keep his mind out of the cell.

He is hopelessly lost in seconds. He tries not to care, but it doesn’t work. He hears Matt open a door and pull something out. It scrapes along the wooden bottom of the closet, sounding heavy and leathery. Matt takes Foggy’s hand and places it on the thing. It is padded, but harder than he expected. “You know,” he says, this is really not how I planned on spending my Saturday night.”

Matt doesn’t exactly laugh, but Foggy hears the smile in his voice. It’s not the same as seeing it, but it’s close. “It’s Monday,” he tells him.

“Huh.” He rolls his eyes. Or at least he thinks he does. “Well if it's Monday that's fine. Right on schedule.”

The world carries on around him, stinking, too loud, too generally awful to contemplate, and he doesn’t know what he is going to do next; how he is going to live, to work, to do anything at all, but as he tries to follow Matt’s instructions, placing one fist after another into the pad as Matt holds it steady, some of the background noise falls away and for a moment, he remembers what peace feels like.

The rest, he’s going to have to figure out when the time comes.


End file.
